Kevin Tran

You are standing behind a bar in Texas with a rag in a hand that is not yours, and the last thing Dwight Kuykendall's body did for you was nothing. It held a glass. The glass was clean. A man at the end of the bar said it was a slow Tuesday and you agreed, and you heard the agreement come out in that low, gravelled voice, and it was like being thanked for something you had not done. The broken nose whistled on every breath. Five-foot-four, heavy through the middle, knees that complained on the mat. He could pour. Beyond that he was a room you had already walked through. So the page with the wheel is open on the phone beside the register, and your thumb, his thumb, thick and sure, is already on it.

The wheel clicks and the bar goes out.

Heat. Steel under your palm. Your right arm is up, reaching for the shelf rail, and your left hand is mid-gesture in the air, shaping a word you do not have. The first thing you do is wrong: the hand goes to the rail too early, closes on nothing, and you feel the body correct. You do it again, slowly, and the fingers find the steel and the tickets hanging there on their clip. Nothing in it is yours to check. You check it anyway. Ten times, each motion, each one on a job this body has done so often it no longer needs you.

He is lighter than the last one. Five-six, hard through the thighs and shoulders, a body that stands a long shift without being asked. The air smells of fryer oil and scorched sugar and the sharp sourness of vinegar. Through the window behind the line the one traffic light hangs red over an empty street, and a sign in the glass says CLOSED, diner, hand-lettered, someone else's failure facing the kitchen.

Then the jacket. Black cotton against your back, damp at the spine, and the cuffs are rolled twice. Your fingers find the roll and it opens a morning: he stood at a mirror in a small bathroom, the platinum dye still smelling of chemicals, and bleached the fringe again because the roots had shown, and cut it straight across with kitchen shears over the sink, careful, tongue between his teeth, pleased. The beard would not fill in. He touched the bare gaps on his cheeks and decided to leave it, stubborn, a little ashamed. Then the jacket, button by button, the right side over the left, the way he was taught. Then the apron, the string wrapped twice and knotted at the front.

The towel at your hip is rough with a hundred washes. You pull it and the memory comes with it, his pride: his first night calling the pass, twenty-two years old and sick with nerves, an older cook saying nothing, only nodding once. It was the best thing anyone ever gave him. Nobody here knows it mattered.

The pen and thermometer in the chest pocket press against you. Under your fingertips, his thumbnail is raw. He picks at the cuticle until it bleeds, always, when he is thinking about money. Debt comes up with it, grey and heavy, a number he does not say aloud. Under the number there is a rent check, and under that a lease he signed for a place on a street with one light. He wanted to cook something real out of nowhere. He is not sure it is working. He does not talk to anyone about that. A vape sits warm in the other pocket, and the want for it is a small clean hook behind his teeth.

Someone down the line is waiting on you. A cook in a black cap looks over, mouth open slightly, because the call is late.

You look at your hands. They are brown and square, the calluses along the first knuckles, the fingers quick. You turn them over. They are steady.

You look up and say, in a voice lighter than the last one, "Hands up. Two salmon, one chicken, fire it." It comes out right. It lands. The cap nods and turns.

How long do you get to stay in the heat of this? Your thumb is on the cuticle again. You cannot tell whether the picking is his or yours.